Intel has silently been working on a new top-of-the-line mobility lineup that features the flagship Core i9-12900HX CPU with 16 cores. This chip has now been leaked and benchmarked within the Geekbench database along with its first benchmarks.

Intel First To 16 Cores on Mobility Platform With Its Alder Lake Core i9-12900HX CPU

The new Intel Core i9-12900HX CPU will provide 16-cores (in an 8+8 configuration) making this chip the first for Intel to offer such a high core count on the laptop segment. The laptop in question is the upcoming Lenovo 82TD and should be an absolute beast in terms of rendering and gaming performance. And yes, while 16 core laptops have existed from AMD, those were based on desktop parts and not mobile chips.

The new Alder Lake-HX series processors will be packaged in the BGA format and there have been multiple sources that claim that this is actually the full desktop die with optimized voltages so that power is conserved and tuned for utmost performance/efficiency on laptops. The new CPU will also offer a higher core and thread count versus the existing Core i9-12900HK. The 12900HK provides a configuration of 14-cores and 20-threads. So that's a 14% increase in core & a 20% increase in the thread count.

Intel will set the base clock for the new Core i9-12900HX at 2.5 GHz with a boost clock as high as 4.89 GHz. It is speculated that the chip will boost to 5.0 GHz upon official release due to any prior testing considered preparatory in practice.

Lenovo's new laptop will also offer the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti laptop GPU, considered the most efficient mobile graphics card on the market. The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti utilizes the latest NVIDIA GA103 GPU.

Currently, the most information about the Alder Lake-HX series, including the 12900HX and 12650HX models, will offer a high base power, or TDP, of 55W. The chip's silicon is based on the 16-core desktop Alder Lake series and offers up to 32 Xe-LP GPU cores, much less than the desktop offering. However, this is inconsequential with the processor aimed at premium gaming systems.

AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX Geekbench Benchmark (Single-Core)

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Core i9-12900H 2k

Core i9-12900HX 1.9k

Ryzen 9 6900HX 1.6k

Core i9 11980HK 1.6k

Ryzen 5980HX 1.5k

Ryzen 9 5900HX 1.4k

AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX Geekbench Benchmark (Multi-Core)

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Core i9-12980HX 16k

Core i9-12900H 14.5k

Ryzen 9 6900HX 10.2k

Core i9 11980HK 9.1k

Ryzen 5980HX 8.2k

Ryzen 9 5900HX 7.6k

The benchmark tests show that in the Geekbench 5 single-core test, the new i9-12900HX scored at 1921 points. In the same test, the multicore score was 15974 points. The average score for the chip is unknown due to the prior i9-12900HK processor not yet part of the official Geekbench charts but as of right now, it's at least 10% faster than the Core i9-12900H with 14 cores and 20 threads.

Intel plans to release the i9-12900HX integrated into mobile systems around the same timeframe as the desktop i9-12900KS CPU. The KS series is a pre-binned desktop processor with boost clocks as high as 5.5 GHz. now the main concern for such chips would be their power consumption where AMD already gives them a huge beating and can lead to several poor battery timings and a chip of this power would require to be plugged in almost all of the time, especially with that RTX 3080 Ti GPU in the same package.

Intel Alder Lake-P Laptop CPU Lineup Specs: